G.I. Bill and ROTC Program
The G.I. Bill and Early Campus Veterans
At its founding, the Claremont Undergraduate School for Men’s student body stood at 86 men, many of whom were veterans returning from service during World War II. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, commonly known as the G.I. Bill of Rights, was passed in June 1944 and saw millions of dollars poured into higher education. The majority of the College’s initial registrants enrolled on the G.I. Bill seeking to pursue a college degree while readjusting to civilian life. Several of the Men’s School’s founding faculty members were also returning veterans. Dr. Gerald I. Jordan, assistant professor of political economy and assistant director of the school, was recently discharged from the Navy upon his hiring; Spanish instructor Bertha Ward had served as a language instructor for the Army; and founding president George C. S. Benson had served in Europe with the Army’s G-5, military affairs, and civil government division. The new Men’s College would continue to attract both veteran students and faculty through its first years of operation.
Below, several of CMC’s first graduating students with the Class of 1948 are featured in issues of the College’s student newspaper, The Analyst. Each student’s academic accomplishments and military service are highlighted, providing a good example of just how many of the College’s first students were returning veterans. (Click on each image to read the student columns in their entirety)
The Pomona-CMC ROTC Program
The history of Claremont McKenna College’s Reserve Officer’s Training Corps began long before the College’s founding in 1946, and in fact, is one of the oldest in the nation. Military training commenced in 1916 on the Pomona College campus during World War I, which also included the short-lived Student Army Training Corps (SATC) initiated in May 1918. Pomona College contracted with the government to receive two SATC companies and used its facilities to train newly enlisted young men for military service and to provide military instruction. The units were demobilized immediately after the Armistice was signed in November 1918, and members of the Corps were offered the opportunity to remain at Pomona College as regular students. Following the war, officer training remained an important program at Pomona and the College was officially authorized an ROTC unit by the War Department at the end of 1918.
As a veteran of the U.S. Army, President George Benson vigorously backed the ROTC program. Between 1946 and 1948, CMC students wishing to enroll in ROTC joined the Pomona unit. After much resistance, the Department of the Army first authorized a joint CMC-Pomona program in the fall of 1948. By the fall of 1949, seventy-one CMC undergraduates were enrolled in the ROTC program commanded by Colonel Theodore Bogart, a West Point infantryman. Reporting this large enrollment, nearly a fifth of the student body, The Analyst speculated that it was perhaps due to the recent announcement that Russia most likely had the atomic bomb. Certain CMC undergraduates used ROTC as a way of resuming their military careers on commissioned status. ROTC cadet A. William “Arch” Kammerer, Jr. '49, for example, had won the Combat Infantryman’s Badge, the Bronze Star, and a Purple Heart as a sergeant in the 406th Infantry in Europe. In November 1948, Kammerer was designated as a Distinguished Military Student, which qualified him for a regular commission upon graduation. Colonel Bogart also administered a program for veterans with at least one year of commissioned service during the war to offer them eligibility for regular Army commissions upon graduation.
As might be expected, the CMC-Pomona Reserve Officer Training Corps, which offered a four-year draft deferment for enrolled cadets, flourished. At the outbreak of the Korean conflict, Benson, a lieutenant colonel in the Army reserve, had traveled to Washington to lobby for continuing support of the ROTC program, as well as the possible establishment of a refresher course for naval supply officers at CMC. While Benson did not secure the naval program, the Korean War boosted ROTC into an important campus activity. Already, in the year before the outbreak of the Korean War, the CMC-Pomona program, under the command of Colonel Theodore Bogart, was emerging as one of the top programs in the California Military District, thanks in part to the presence in the ROTC unit of experienced World War II veterans seeking reserve commissions. Once the Korean War began, the granting of draft exemptions to all ROTC students, announced by Benson in January 1951 after his return from Washington, where he served on the ROTC panel of the Department of Defense, made the program even more popular. While only 200,000 ROTC deferments had been granted nationwide, Benson announced that the CMC-Pomona share of this quota would be sufficient to extend exemptions to all ROTC cadets. Needless to say, the program prospered. At the time, the CMC-Pomona program–the only dual college program in the nation–enrolled some 300 students, evenly divided between the two institutions.
Throughout the Korean War, The Analyst reported extensively on Benson’s trips to Washington for meetings of the ROTC panel. It was comforting, after all, to have the CMC president on the inside in the vital matter of draft deferment policy. Through academic year 1951-1952, the CMC-Pomona unit offered commissions only in the infantry–a chilling prospect for many, given the fierce infantry combat in Korea. In part because of Benson’s urging, the infantry program was expanded in the following year to a general program allowing CMC graduates to be commissioned in all branches, including the technical and support services, depending on individual ability and the needs of the Army.
CMC’s first alumnus to be killed while on active duty, Lee Penn Blind '51, joined the U.S. Navy as an aviator following his graduation from Claremont Men’s College. Sadly, Blind died during a training accident at Naval Air Station, Pensacola, Florida in 1953. (Read his entire story below)
